MAYFIELD, Ky. — When the wind died down and the ice storm had passed, Joe Stutzman gathered his spare lanterns and stepped out of his Amish farmhouse to lend them to his modern-living neighbors.
“I feel sorry for my neighbors who were used to electricity and all of a sudden didn’t have it,” Stutzman said. “I know that must be hard for them.”
Hundreds of thousands of people in Kentucky have been without electricity since the killer storm hit more than a week ago, and some spots might not get power back for weeks.
But Kentucky’s Amish have been living that way all their lives. And when the disaster struck, they generously lent a hand to their non-Amish neighbors and showed them how it’s done.
“Those folks are very good at sustaining themselves,” said Master Sgt. Paul Mouilleseaux, a National Guard spokesman.
The Stutzman family and the roughly 8,500 other Amish in the state were essentially unaffected by the storm that knocked out power to more than 1.3 million customers last week, half of them in Kentucky.
Stutzman, his wife and their seven children were secure in their toasty, two-story home amid corn and soybean fields in western Kentucky.
“We paid it no attention,” Stutzman said Tuesday.
He grabbed a log, threw it in the wood stove and lit a kerosene lamp. The cellar was stocked with canned goods, the milk cow safe in the barn. Stutzman’s wife and two of their daughters used the wood-fired oven to do their baking.
James and Beverly Hutchins, a non-Amish couple who sheltered nine relatives in their home, said they don’t know what they would have done without the Amish family across the road.
The neighbors brought over hot coffee every morning, provided well water, cooked a meal for them, lent them a kerosene lantern and fixed the one lantern the Hutchinses had.
Beverly Hutchins said she told the Amish family that she would turn her porch light on when the power came back. That finally happened Tuesday night.
